http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/13/sports/russia-doping-sochi-olympics-2014.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=curRussian Doctor Explains How He Helped
Beat Doping Tests at the Sochi Olympics
By REBECCA R. RUIZ, K.K. REBECCA LAI, YULIYA PARSHINA-KOTTAS and JEREMY WHITE MAY 13, 2016
The director of Russia’s antidoping laboratory during the 2014 Winter Olympics revealed to The New York Times how Russian agents used an elaborate scheme to swap out tainted urine samples from Russian athlete
Grigory Rodchenkov, the antidoping laboratory director, said that each night a sports official sent him a list of athletes whose samples needed to be swapped.
Athletes also sent photos of their doping control forms to help identify which urine sample were theirs.
Upon receiving a signal, usually after midnight, Dr. Rodchenkov went to Room 124. The room was officially a storage space, but he and his team had converted it into a laboratory.
Room 124 was next to the official sample collection room where the bottles of urine were kept.
A colleague in the collection room passed the urine samples through a hole in the wall near the floor. The openings were covered with white plastic caps. The opening on the collection room side was also concealed by a small faux-wood cabinet during the day.
The urine sample bottles, manufactured by Berlinger, a Swiss company, were designed so that they could not be opened without breaking the cap once the bottle had been sealed. When it is time to test the urine sample, the cap is removed by breaking it into two parts with tools or machines sold by Berlinger.
In Room 124, Dr. Rodchenkov received the sealed bottles through the hole and handed them to a man who he believed was a Russian intelligence officer. The man took the bottles to a building nearby. Within a few hours, the bottles were returned with the caps loose and unbroken.
Dr. Rodchenkov’s team emptied and cleaned the bottles with filter paper and filled them with untainted urine collected from the athletes months before the Olympics.
They would then add table salt or water to balance out any inconsistencies in the recorded specifications of the two samples. Depending on what an athlete had consumed, two urine samples taken at different times could vary.
A third of Russia’s 33 medals were awarded to athletes whose names appeared on a spreadsheet outlining the government’s doping plan.